Unfold
by Demus
Summary: Time watches her favoured child die, desolate tears tainting her elegant eternity. Surreal and strange. Angsty. Contains refernces to the old series as well as the new.


Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who.

Time watches her favoured child die, desolate tears tainting her elegant eternity.

* * *

With crystal tears in her eyes, she watched his death. He was centuries old, millennia wise- her greatest friend, her best-loved antagonist. She cried whilst she watched his suffering.

Misty green pools were slowly, painfully revealed under heavy red eyelids, bloodshot and broken. She smiled at him as he drew into the agony of consciousness, salty liquid trickling from her empty gaze. His raspy breath hitched in his throat and he struggled to sit up, fighting ancient flesh and deteriorating muscles. She hurried to his side, sure and steady in her sugar-spun gossamer shoes. Her deep red hair tumbled around her as she sank to her knees next to the overstuffed tartan armchair.

"Lady, do not kneel to me," he croaked, clearly distressed by her subservient gesture. His frail skin-stretched-over-bone arms lifted a little under his woollen blankets and he reached impotently for her.

Time shushed him, stroking pale-perfect fingertips across his brow and down the gaunt face. "Hush, beloved," she soothed, her icy touch burning a blue trail into his skin. "Gently now."

He moaned in pain at the caress, tensing as the searing sent spasms through his body, but twisted closer to her to receive the blessing. "How quickly I destroy you," she intoned, regret weeping in her still-day-wind-chime voice.

"I don't fear it, Lady," he forced out. The fingers pulled away and he relaxed.

"Last of the Time Lords, last of my warriors," she crooned. "Who will protect me when you are gone?"

He looked at her as she rested her head in his lap, her adoring pupil-less eyes fixed on him. Her shimmering silver-green gown clung to her insubstance as life clings to reality. The decadent finery was fading before him, her glory torn and ragged. A gaping wound in her side dribbled black poison, drooling toxins over her stomach and legs like some obscene birthing stain. He touched a claw of a hand to her luxurious locks. She purred like a contented leopard, curling her delicate form around his legs like a niece grown too big to sit in the lap of her favourite uncle. "Does it pain you?" he asked her.

Her smile widened, mysterious and fey. "Silly mortal, I scream and scream with the agony of it. My entirety rends itself into jagged shrieking pieces and tears like a rabid dog into every part of me. My Space brother cannot help me. Only you. My Doctor. _I want you safe."_

"You spoke through Rose," he said, abstractly. "All those years ago."

Time stared at him as he lost himself in the mighty chasms of his memory; wandering halls that made his eyes glimmer with a thousand voices, a thousand faces, his memories the sum of his total. She traced the edges of her wound, reflecting on her favourite son- this worlds-wise guide, leading his many companions to the precipice edge to marvel at its height with a childlike grin of wonder on his face. He laughs with delight as majestic avalanches rumble threateningly past him, feeling his friend's hand tighten on his. They can let go- that is their choice. But he will not let them choose to fall. He clasps them tighter for a moment, then nudges them to the path of safety.

Her half-human, half-blind, unblinkered healer, righting such wrongs as he found. "So many times you've held the fate of a world in the palm of you hand," she wondered, as his weary head nodded, made heavy by the weight of his suffering. "And so many times you would think to let it go for a tiny wisp of a speck of a life. For your unworthy disciples."

For their untouchable love, their passionless ardour, their sexless marriage. Time could not understand it- she could see barely anything of mortal matters. Her passage was so deep, so inexorable, that the weak sparks of human life meant little to her. Neither male nor female. She could barely comprehend this tiny one who walked half in her shadow, her precious vagabond, shunned and welcomed. Her restive traveller with no home and no place- just his battered police box and his days like crazy paving. _"Officially I am here quite unofficially…for once I was able to steer the TARDIS..."_

The slender woman pirouetted to her feet, restless with the brightness of her beloved's recollections. She glided to the edge of the room and placed the palms of her hands on the wall, feeling the slowing pulse under her fingertips. She felt the prickle of unearthly tears inside her head and leaned her forehead against the sparse organic heartbeat. "I wait for no creature," she whispered to the faltering TARDIS, "I would break myself for him, if only he would let me."

The sobbing in her mind magnified and she was swept into a roaring floodtide of desolation. Images flickered before her, stronger than ever, emotions colouring brighter, sharper, feistier. The timeship cried for her bonded partner. Wincing, Time pressed a gentle kiss to the freezing surface, as a parent would kiss a fevered child. "Shh, my beautiful one. Soon we will be as one again and your pain will be nothing to the solitude of my nothingness."

A stirring behind her distracted her attention. Abandoning her post, she hurried back to the dying creature in the chair. He gasped and choked awake, his hand scrabbling wildly for contact. She hesitated, knowing she would hurt him, then gripped his hand tight. He cried out, his fingers wrapping steel-strong around hers. "Don't let go," he pleaded, his chest heaving, his eyes just slits staring wildly out at her.

She shook her head, pulling him into her icy embrace. She could feel his warmth fading, leeching out into her as her eternity swamped him. He groaned, thrashing in her arms, shuddering violently at her razorblade comfort. At some desperate, unknown urging he lifted his head to rest on her shoulder.

Salty tears of mortal and immortal mingled in their kiss. The Doctor felt Time within him and without and let himself go. His body slumped, then began to glow a soft candlelight golden, motes of his being fluttering into the air as his corporeal self disintegrated.

Alive to ever facet of the world, Time watched his great heart follow its tangible self. "You gave me no answer, Time Lord. Who will protect me when you are gone?"

A rumble chuckled through the ether towards her, nuances of a million smiles echoing in his carefree laughter. "Somewhere in the murky mists if history, a military man stands tall and proud. He is an officer, a leader, the keystone and the heart of his organisation. His troops respect him for his bravery, his intelligence, his belligerence. The fact that he knows all their names and asks after their families in the mess hall. He bares his teeth in his rare bold smile, raising his arm in a defiant salute to the darkness of this Universe, his British Army uniform at its best. He is unruffled by the evilest and most dangerous of beings Nature has ever produced on any planet. _You there, chap with the wings, five rounds rapid._ I nudged, I pulled. I watched him, and others like him, from the shadows with the strings in my hands. I left them there to guard their ages, for I cannot. They will protect you."

Time bowed her head. "Then go in peace, favoured son."

With tears in her eyes, she let him die.


End file.
